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ABOUT: Solidarity with the anarchists accused of bank robbery

The story begins on a hot summer day of 2015, when a comrade from Amsterdam was arrested on the Greek-Bulgarian border, because of an arrest warrant issued by the prosecution office of Aachen, Germany, accusing her of a bank robbery that took place in Aachen in 2013. After spending 5 months in detention she was released, with charges dropped and no conditions to her release. The very disappointed prosecution made recourse to the higher court, which granted a trial which began on the 4th of November 2016. The trial concluded at the beginning of December with the acquittal of the anarchist. However, since then the prosecution has gone into revision appeal, where a panel of higher court judges will evaluate if there were any procedural mistakes made during the trial. In case they deem that these errors took place, the whole court case will start again anew.

The same prosecution office arrested in the spring of 2016, on different occasions, two other anarchists from Barcelona for a bank robbery that took place against a Pax Bank in 2014. They have since been extradited from Spain and incarcerated in the dungeons of NordRhein WestFalen under the preventive investigation regime (U-haft). Their trial began on the 23rd of January 2017, and concluded on the 7th of June 2017. At the verdict one comrade was sentences to seven and a half years, while the other comrade was acquitted.

Although these two cases, (the one from 2013 that implicates the Amsterdam anarchist, and the one from 2014 of the Barcelona comrades) are separated we stand in solidarity with these three anarchists who do not fold their dignity, ethics and ideas in the wake of repression. It is of no importance to us whether they are guilty or innocent, these are self-serving binary logics used by the legal system to impose their laws that aim to determine a life of work, alienation, obedience and resignation.

There are no legal parametres or strategic limits for anarchists to base their expression of solidarity towards comrades facing repression. These calculations are not the measures nor principals that move us. Instead solidarity is an integral part of our struggle, responding to the need of standing beside our friends and affinities who face the blows of the State, and who do not compromise their thirst for freedom and rebellion against a world based on exploitation and authority.

The texts that you will find on these pages are one of the many tools that we are using to take space and put our own words, thoughts and struggle into a repressive situation, which is often dictated by the suffocating and sentencing moves of our enemies, and their official microphones, the mainstream media. Here you will find updates about the legal situations, texts of analysis about repression and prison, correspondence, actions claimed in solidarity with the implicated comrades and against the prison-system.